Homeschool/Unschool - Do Not Trust Government to Raise Your Child.

Living free means divorcing yourself from as many of the government's control systems as possible and one of the most powerful and insidious systems is public education.

Public Education is not about education.  It's about robbing children from their parents, breaking up families, and creating soldiers.

When you think about it and put things in perspective, the idea of sending your children off to strangers to be raised is absolutely insane. 

Most people would never even think that they are doing this, but think about it.  The average American works until 5pm, and gets home between 5:30 and 6pm.  That means that their children are being cared for by others from the time they are dropped off at school around 8am, until 6pm.  You get home, just in time to feed them and make sure they do their homework before going to bed. 

Homework exists to ensure that the government institution that is raising them does not allow too much interaction with the parents, so even while at home, the children are under government control.  It is based on the ridiculous notion that 6-7 hours of instruction is insufficient to educate the child, yet homeschooled kids who regularly out-perform public schooled kids, spend only 3-4 hours a day doing lessons. 

Think about this.  Your child learned to walk by watching you.  They learned to speak by imitating you.  For the first few years of your child's life from the time he was born, the child knew you as his teacher.  A special bond developed in the child's mind between you and your child.  You were imprinted in the child's mind before he could talk that he learned great things from you.

Then the system demanded that you hand over your child to others to teach them.  This was a strange concept to the child and it is a very new idea in human history and the results have been disastrous.  It's time to scrap this 18th century Prussian system and go back to what humans have done for the majority of our existence, educate our own children, maintaining that special bond that was formed early in your child's life.

The idea of homeschooling seems overwhelming and daunting to many parents who have never done it.  Think about that for a minute.  Why should a properly educated adult feel intimidated about teaching a child, let alone THEIR OWN CHILD?  What have they been doing all this time? 

Homeschooling is simple, there are many resources available to help you.  Find people who are successful homeschoolers, network with them, and learn from them.  Structure is not as important as you think it is. 

Some recommended resources are listed here: 
www.KhanAcademy.com
www.udemy.com
www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses - Over 1300 FREE Online Courses from major universities (and counting).
www.udacity.com
www.wikipedia.org
https://www.arduino.cc - Learn electronic development and coding using these open-source cheap-as-dirt microcontroller development boads.
www.raspberrypi.org - Lean to write code in Python and other languages using these open-source cheap computers.


Feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments.

The Importance of Learning at Home - Even if Your Kids are in Public School

One of the downsides of the government-run education system is that it teaches kids (though not necessarily overtly) that authority, truth, and knowledge all come from public (government-run) institutions.

Children are tested on the retention of trivia such as the date of an historical event - rather than the importance of what caused the event or why.  

Creative thinking is often discouraged in favor of rote memorization and regurgitation of factoids that have little practical use in the real world.  

Arduino Uno R3 Microcontroller

This is one reason that I am very excited about the Maker Movement.  The Maker Movement encourages is to be creative, to learn by applying skills in practical projects that they design and build themselves.  With the advent of very inexpensive developer boards like the Arduino series of microcontrollers and the Raspberry Pi Linux Computer (all under $35 or so), kids are now more empowered to learn real-world practical skills by exploring, being resourceful, and the application of trial and error (rather than being taught that mistakes are wrong). 

Since everything in the Maker Movement is Open-Source, software for projects is all free of charge.  Kids and contribute to projects and have friends and other members of the Maker Community collaborate with them - thus teaching them how accomplishments are made in the real world (In contrast, most "collaboration" in public school is considered cheating).  This teaches cooperation and teamwork in the pursuit of their goals rather than isolation and competition.  

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

What's more is that these devices are so inexpensive that if they experience a catastrophic failure and they damage or destroy a device, it really isn't all that expensive of a lesson.  

The Arduino Microcontrollers are great for bringing computing into the real/physical world.  Lots of I/O pins allow software to control physical tings such as servos, motors, relays, pumps, LEDs, speakers, and more.  Before long kids will be building their own robots using these devices.  

The Raspberry Pi is more of a standard computer.  It has an HDMI output which allows your HDTV to become a computer monitor.  Four USB ports, Ethernet, an SD Card slot, Camera port, and GPIO pins, and the Linux-based OS make it extremely powerful.  The NOOBS (New Out Of the Box) software includes a hackable version of Minecraft so that kids can learn to automate a lot of their gameplay or creations that they wish to build through writing software in Python.  

There are plenty of projects that incorporate both of these development boards as well.  The Internet is full of instructions for projects they can build and modify to their liking.  

So with this in mind, I will begin a series of tutorials on these devices, starting with the Arduino boards.